Tempted

said.
    “I’m okay. I think.” Her voice surprised her. It sounded so weak, so outside the norm that it was her first hint that even though she’d escaped the sun, she might not have escaped its effects.
    “I cannot see anything,” he said.
    “It’s because the earth sealed itself over us to shield me from the sun.”
    “We’re trapped here?” His voice wasn’t panicky, but it wasn’t exactly calm either.
    “No, I can get us out whenever I want,” she explained. Then, on second thought, she added, “And, well, the earth over us isn’t very deep. If I drop dead you could dig out pretty easily. How are you? That wing must really hurt.”
    “Do you feel as if you might die?” he asked, ignoring her question about his wing.
    “I don’t think so. Okay, actually, I don’t know. I feel kinda funny.”
    “Funny? Explain that.”
    “Like I’m not really attached to my body.”
    “Does your body hurt?”
    Stevie Rae thought about it, and was surprised by what she discovered. “No. Actually, I don’t hurt at all.” It was weird, though, that her voice kept getting weaker and weaker.
    Suddenly his hand was touching her face, sliding down to her neck and arm and—
    “Ouch! You’re hurting me.”
    “You’re burned badly. I can feel it. You need help.”
    “Can’t leave here or I’ll finish burning up,” she said, wondering why the earth seemed to be spinning around beneath her.
    “What can I do to help you?”
    “Well, you can get a big tarp or somethin’ and put it over me while you take me to the blood bank downtown. That sounds really good right now.” Stevie Rae lay there, thinking she’d never been so thirsty in her life. She wondered, with a detached sense of curiosity, if she was really going to die. It seemed a shame, after all that Rephaim had gone through to help her.
    “Blood is what you need?”
    “Blood is all I need. It’s what makes me tick, which is more than kinda gross, but still. It’s the truth. Cross my heart and hope to die.” She giggled a little hysterically, and then sobered. “Wait, that’s not really very funny.”
    “If you don’t get blood, you’ll die?”
    “I think I might,” she said, finding it hard to care too much.
    “Then if blood will heal you, take mine. I owe you a life. That’s why I saved you on the roof, but if you die here, you die without my debt being repaid. So if you need blood, take mine,” he repeated.
    “But you don’t smell right,” she blurted.
    From the darkness he sounded irritated and offended. “That is what the red fledglings said, too. My blood does not smell right to you because I’m not meant to be one of your prey. I am the son of an immortal. I’m not your victim.”
    “Hey, I don’t have victims; not anymore,” she protested weakly.
    “The truth still holds. I smell different to you because I
am
different. I was not created to be your lunch.”
    “I never said you were.” She meant her words to come out sounding snappy and kinda defensive. Instead her voice was faint, and her head felt strangely huge, like it was going to pop off her neck at any second and float up through the ground and into the clouds like a giant birthday balloon.
    “Right-smelling or not, it’s blood. I owe you a life. So you will drink, and you will live.”
    Stevie Rae cried out as Rephaim’s hand found her again and he pulled her against his body. She felt the skin of her burned arms and shoulders rip off and mix with the earth. Then she was resting on the softness of his feathers. She sighed deeply. It wouldn’t be so bad to die here in the earth, in a nest of feathers. As long as she didn’t move, it didn’t even hurt much.
    She felt Rephaim move, though. And realized he’d sliced his beak across the gash that Kurtis had made in his bicep. It had stopped bleeding, but this new laceration immediately began to weep, filling their little pocket in the earth with the thick scarlet scent of his immortal blood.
    Then he shifted again and suddenly his bleeding arm was pressed against her lips.
    “Drink,” he said harshly. “Help me rid myself of this debt.”
    She drank, automatically at first. His blood had, after all, been stinky. It’d smelled wrong, wrong, wrong.
    Then it touched her tongue. Its taste was like nothing Stevie Rae could have imagined. It wasn’t like the scent of him; it wasn’t anything remotely like the scent of him. Instead it was an incredible surprise, filling her mouth and her soul with its